THE
LEARNING CURVE<\/p>\n
I have a friend in her late sixties who is smart and healthy. She
works out, her mind is keen and her instincts are sharp, but I\u2019ve watched her\u00a0get less experimental and more rigid. \u201cWhy don’t you learn to play the guitar?\u201d\u00a0I asked her once when she was complaining that her life was boring. \u201cYou told\u00a0me you wish you\u2019d learned to play an instrument when you were young. Why don’t
you start now? It\u2019s never too late.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t tolerate being bad at anything at this stage in my\u00a0life,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n
That kind of thinking will lead you straight into the nursing\u00a0home. And if you are in a nursing home, you can still start at the beginning of something new and move forward. It doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re thirty-six or sixty-six or eighty-six. If you decide you\u2019re too old to learn something new, then you\u2019re right. You are too old. It’s all in the way you think about it.<\/p>\n
I used\u00a0to imagine that when I got old enough, I would know pretty much everything\u00a0there was to know. If I didn’t, I thought that learning something new would be\u00a0easy. Why wouldn\u2019t it be? I\u2019d been figuring things out for long, I could avoid\u00a0the learning curve and just jump right in. I was wrong \u2013 about all of it. In\u00a0fact, as I get older, I seem to know less and I work harder to learn new\u00a0things. It takes more energy, not less, to get up off the couch, turn off the\u00a0TV, and take that first step.<\/p>\n
I knew\u00a0an actress in her nineties who played hip grandmothers in a number of hit\u00a0movies. \u201cIs it hard to memorize lines, show up early in the morning and\u00a0interact with people?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s\u00a0how I stay alert,\u201d she told me. \u201cI didn’t start my acting career until I was\u00a0eighty.\u201d<\/p>\n
When I\u00a0start anything new, I get frustrated at first. I feel like throwing up my hands\u00a0as I make up excuses to remain a dinosaur. \u201cI was born in the wrong era. I\u00a0didn’t come out of the womb with an iPhone in my hand. My old telephone works\u00a0perfectly well. I just wasn\u2019t programmed to learn the technology.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
But learning\u00a0something new exercises your brain, helps you stay awake and alert, and keeps\u00a0depression at bay. I keep that in mind when I get a new remote for the TV or\u00a0change operating systems on my computer. It\u2019s all about the learning curve. You\u00a0can\u2019t expect to pick up a guitar for the first time and play like Eric Clapton.\u00a0You don’t go to your first ballet class and perform a pirouette like Misty\u00a0Copeland. You don\u2019t create suspense like Stephen King when you write your first\u00a0horror story. You don’t build your characters as expertly as Anne Tyler does.\u00a0Not yet. The ladder to excellence is tall and you have to climb up rung by\u00a0rung. You try, make mistakes, delete, drop back to Square One, and try again in\u00a0order to eventually and painstakingly rise above mediocrity.<\/p>\n
When\u00a0you do anything new and challenging for the first time, it often starts so\u00a0poorly, mediocrity is a step up. We have to learn to tolerate it. Stephen King\u2019s\u00a0first novel, Carrie, was rejected by thirty publishers. He was living in a trailer with his wife and two kids at the time, and he was so discouraged, he threw the manuscript into the trash. Luckily for him, his wife, Tabitha, retrieved the book and urged him to keep working on it. Carrie was eventually published by Doubleday and made into a blockbuster movie, marking the beginning of Stephen King\u2019s long and successful writing career. But it began with a learning curve. When he was starting out, he stuck his rejection letters on a nail on the wall. \u201cBy the time\u00a0I was fourteen,\u201d he said, \u201cthe nail in my wall would no longer support the
weight of the rejection\u00a0slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a
spike and went on writing.\u201d He had no idea he would grow up to become Stephen\u00a0King.<\/p>\n
Being\u00a0consistent and making an oath to not give up will take you where you want to\u00a0go. You have to ignore comments from other people, put your nose to the grindstone,\u00a0tell your inner critic to shut up and just keep moving. Agatha Christie was\u00a0rejected for five years before she found a publisher. Beloved poet Toni\u00a0Morrison won the Nobel Peace Prize when she was 62. Agatha Christie was\u00a0rejected for five years before she found a publisher. It took Thomas Edison
thousands of attempts to invent the light bulb.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0list is long and all of these people defied the odds and didn’t cower in the\u00a0face of mediocrity or failure. It was not a cakewalk for any of them, but what\u00a0if they had given up or decided they were too old to take the first step? We\u00a0would be deprived of their magnificent artistic expression and we would miss\u00a0out on being inspired by them.<\/p>\n
When\u00a0I\u2019m reticent about writing a journal entry a blog or a book, I tell myself to\u00a0stop wondering who will like it or comparing myself to anyone else. I\u2019ve\u00a0written over a dozen books and when my students ask me where to begin, I always\u00a0give them the same answer: Begin in the middle. Lace up your sneakers, take the\u00a0first step on the learning curve and feel it drawing you forward. It’s like\u00a0getting into a car on a roller coaster. Once the safety belt clicks and it\u00a0chugs into action, you\u2019re in for the duration with all of its swoops and free\u00a0falls, no matter how much you want to get off. Personally, I hate roller
coasters and avoid them like the plague, but the metaphor stands. Just sit\u00a0down, put your hands gently on the keyboard and let them take off like a\u00a0planchette on a Ouija board. Wherever you end up, it\u2019ll be a great ride to\u00a0parts unknown.<\/p>\n
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THELEARNING CURVE I have a friend in her late sixties who is smart and healthy. Sheworks out, her mind is keen and her instincts are sharp, but I\u2019ve watched her\u00a0get less experimental and more rigid. \u201cWhy don’t you learn to play the guitar?\u201d\u00a0I asked her once when she was complaining that her life was boring. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2184,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2185"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2186,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2185\/revisions\/2186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}